Historians of all types take for granted that something called "custom" existed. Then they use the term lazily, as did people in the pre-modern era, to refer to many types of legal rules and norms. But if we take seriously the Roman law definition adopted by the medieval jurists that custom is repeated behavior over time to which the majority of the community has tacitly consented to be bound, then how did this custom work? How was it formed? How did it evolve over time? What effect did writing have on it? What was its relationship to enacted and learned law? Is the Roman concept of custom and its reality in practice the same as the German distinction between Gewohnheitsrecht and Rechtsgewohnheit? And, most fundamentally, did custom as defined by the Roman law actually ever exist at all? If not, why did the jurists spend so much energy debating its intricacies?

On the occasion of the presentation of LECTIO’s new book series, Professor Emily Kadens

(Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago) will deliver a public lecture on Thursday 2

October entitled ‘The Intellectual History of Custom’. In addition, on Friday 3 October she will

lead a seminar on ‘The Trouble with Custom’.

After an introductory session by Professor Kadens, the seminar will provide the opportunity to

selected doctoral and post-doctoral scholars to present their research during a paper session and to discuss it with Professor Kadens and the other participants. We particularly welcome paper proposals that deal with one of the following topics:

1. The relationship between custom as it worked in daily life and the legal theory of

custom;

2. The use of custom as an argument in law, philosophy, theology, philology, history, etc.;

3. The interaction between legal history and intellectual history Interdisciplinary approaches and case studies that illustrate these topics from a historical or present day perspective are an asset.

Successful applicants are expected to give a 10-minute ‘Work-in-Progress’ talk in English followed by a 20-minute discussion.

A paper (max. 10 pages) and a short CV should be submitted no later than 25 August 2014 to

The Groningen Centre for Law and Governance (GCL) and the Department of Private and Notarial Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of Groningen, will organize the conference Understanding Legal Reasoning, A Role for History and Philosophy in Modern Private Law on 11 and 12 September 2014.all information here

Conference theme

The Connection of Private Law with History and Philosophy

The privileged flow of communication which used to link private lawyers to legal historians and philosophers is nowadays reduced to a trickle. Today, most private lawyers, influenced by a European trend in higher education which encourages specialisation at the expense of foundational subjects, ask themselves why historical and philosophical modules have not yet been removed from the academic curricula in favour of legal subjects perceived as more in line with current developments.

Yet, the European legal systems were developed by jurists who were well aware of the historical and theoretical roots of their science. For example, the Pandectists, the forefathers of the influential German civil code, developed German law largely on the basis of Roman law. Even the English common law contains clear examples of the fruitful relationship linking private law to history and philosophy. Thus, William Blackstone, the author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England – arguably the most systematic and certainly the most influential analysis of English law – and the first Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University, was an excellent classical scholar.

Whereas the detachment of private law from historical and philosophical investigations has its roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is during the twentieth century that the fading interest for historical and philosophical studies in Europe becomes an indisputable fact. The demise of Roman law as a system of living law, the expansion of commercial law after the Second World War, the pressure on higher education institutions to produce as many lawyers as possible in the shortest possible time: these are just some of the factors which might have contributed to the decline of the productive cross-fertilisation. For their part, legal historians and philosophers bear their share of responsibility for the present situation: beyond the lively discussion concerning the cultural and legal roots European private law, there have been few attempts to include private lawyers in the modern theoretical and historical debates and to highlight the practical significance of foundational subjects for the enhancement of the legal skills.

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, and there is a focus on the publicization of law.

The author uses Herbert Hart’s schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state, and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field.

These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called “constitutional” revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law.

In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly.​

29 July 2014

The Roman Law of Obligations presents a series of lectures delivered by the late Peter Birks as an introductory course in Roman law. Discovered in complete manuscript form following his death, the lectures are published here for the first time.

Customers can claim the discount by visiting our website at www.oup.co.uk/law, adding a book to the shopping basket, and entering the code ALAUTH14 in the promotional code box.

Nomôdos announces the publication of a French translation of the Spanish neo-scholastic author Vitoria's De Justitia by the philosopher Jean-Paul Coujou (Toulouse). More information at the Dalloz website. In addition, other recent French Vitoria-translations are signalled in the Nomôdos-post.

Nomodôs announced the publication of a work at the crossroads of law and the general development of science in the eighteenth century. Interestingly, the work has been published both in French and in English.

This book sets forth the evolution of Korea's law and legal system from the Chosǒn dynasty through the colonial and postcolonial modern periods. This is the first book in English that comprehensively studies Korean legal history in comparison with European legal history, with particular emphasis on customary law. Korea's passage to Romano-German civil law under Japanese rule marked a drastic departure from its indigenous legal tradition. The transplantation of modern civil law in Korea was facilitated by Japanese colonial jurists who themselves created a Korean customary law; this constructed customary law served as an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern law. The transformation of Korean law by the brisk forces of Westernization points to new interpretations of colonial history and it presents an intriguing case for investigating the spread of law on the global level. In-depth discussions of French customary law and Japanese legal history in this book provide a solid conceptual framework suitable for comparing European and East Asian legal traditions.

A comprehensive survey of Korean legal history, covering traditional law, colonial law and modern Korean law

The first book in English on Korean colonial law and jurisprudence

The first book that approaches Korean legal history from a comparative perspective, providing comparisons between East Asian legal history and European legal history

The Digital Panopticon is a four-year international digital history project to link together existing and new genealogical, biometric and criminal justice datasets held by different organisations in the UK and Australia, exploring the impact of the different types of penal punishments on the lives of 66,000 people sentenced at The Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875. We have six PhD studentships available with topics including convict lives and careers, recidivism, social and spatial worlds, and the impact of digital resources on the history of crime, spread across the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield and Tasmania.

The deadlines for applications are 28 July (Liverpool and Sheffield) and 31 July (Tasmania). The UK-based studentships will be interviewed in August, to start 1 October 2014.

17 July 2014

WHAT: "The British Legal History Conference 2015 – Law: Challenges to Authority and the

Recognition of Rights"

WHERE: University of Reading

WHEN: 8-11 July 2015

In celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta the theme of the British Legal History Conference 2015 at the University of Reading is ‘Law: Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights’.

While different forms and ideas of authority have shaped law historically, law has also been moulded by, and influenced, challenges to authority brought to assert and seek recognition of rights. Magna Carta resulted from one such challenge, but challenges to social, economic, political and doctrinal authorities existed before Magna Carta and have continued to occur since. The British Legal History Conference 2015 is concerned to explore how law, both public and private, has been shaped by, and shaped, challenges to authority brought to seek the recognition of rights. It welcomes papers which examine how law, legal processes and legal actors have developed in response to such challenges to authority, and indeed how an understanding of the law has itself often influenced these challenges. While the conference will explore challenges of different natures and from different epochs, proposals concerned with Magna Carta, and particularly its impact beyond England, are welcomed.

In addition to this general call for papers, the 2015 Conference will also include a special session for young and less experienced scholars. The organisers welcome proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers for this session.

Proposals for papers (maximum 300 words) should be submitted to BLHC2015@reading.ac.uk

The University of RomaTre and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in collaboration with the Sorbonne, have recently established a new Double Master Degree caracterized by an original structure and a fresh aim. The goal of this master is in fact to open the doors of law departments to people trained in humanities and social sciences in order to be introduced to the world of legal as well as other kinds of normativities. The master is of course open also to law students. The students will spend one year in Paris and one year in Rome and the cost of the apartments will be included in the enrollment fees. They will be admitted to a number of regular courses held in the 3 universities involved, as well as to ad hoc seminars and stages (e.g. in the legal clinics of the RomaTre University).

Enrollment is possible at the University of RomaTre until the end of July 2014.

Master in diritto e normatività comparate

Dir. Prof. Emanuele Conte (Univ.RomaTre) and

Prof. Paolo Napoli (CENJ - EHESS Paris)

For more information, click here or write to giuseppina.santilli@uniroma3.it.

08 July 2014

The Legal History Blog signals an opportunity for early-stage researchers working or intending to work on European Administrative Law (16th-20th Century), at the MPI for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. Deadline: 30 September 2014 (for Fellowships covering the year 2015).

At the end of 2012 Prof. Dr. Erk Volkmar Heyen, Professor of Public Law
and European Administrative History at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University
of Greifswald until his retirement and the editor of the "Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte/Yearbook
of European Administrative History" (JEV) published from 1989 to 2008,
donated a research fellowship in the field of European Administrative
History ("The JEV-Fellowship for European Administrative History"). The
fellowship falls within the framework of the German University
Foundation (Bonn, Germany).

The scholarship is intended to
benefit the next generation of scientific researchers, particularly
doctoral and post-doctoral students, and specifically for the final
phase of their research project for a duration of no longer than 12
months. The scholarship is based on the usual rates for doctoral
fellowships of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Should a fellowship
be awarded for research abroad, the local conditions will be the
determining factor. Marital status will not be deemed a consideration,
and neither will travel- nor other costs be reimbursed.

The
Board of the German University Foundation decides on and awards the
fellowship based on a proposal by a jury. This jury is based at the Max
Planck Institute for European Legal History (MPI) in Frankfurt, where
the founder worked in the 1980s. Currently the permanent members of the
jury are: the Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute, Prof. Dr.
Thomas Duve, Prof. Dr. Stefan Brakensiek, Professor of Early Modern
History at the Institute for History of the University of
Duisburg-Essen, and Priv.-Doz. Dr. Peter Collin, Research Fellow at the
Max Planck Institute. The German University Foundation provides for the
payment of the fellowships and informs the recipients about the terms
and conditions and the legal requirements to be complied with by the
recipients in their personal capacities.

Early stage researchers
from Germany and abroad are invited to apply. In accordance with the
thematic and methodological spectrum covered by the JEV, the scholarship
is open to all historical disciplines, provided the research project
addresses an aspect of European administrative history from the period
of the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The importance of the
research topic should impact beyond the national level. Comparative
research questions are particularly welcome.

HSozuKult signals the call for papers of a conference to be held next year in May at the Berlin-based MPI for Human Development, focusing on "Criminal Law and Emotions in European Legal Cultures: From 16th Century to the Present". Deadline: 1 October 2014.

Mission statement:

KEYNOTES
Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt University)
David Sabean (UCLA)
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Dagmar Ellerbrock (MPIB/TU Dresden)
Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt University)
Legal institutions and jurists have often perceived themselves
and promoted an image of their role and activity as essentially
‘rational’. Yet, emotions have always been integral to the law,
particularly in the case of criminal law. Emotions were and are taken
explicitly or implicitly into consideration in legal debates, in
law-making, in the codified norms and in their application, especially
in relation to paramount categories such as free will, individual
responsibility and culpability, or the aggravating and mitigating
circumstances of a crime. Emotions could directly or indirectly play a
role in defining what conduct was legally relevant, worthy of legal
protection or in need of legal proscription; in why and how it was
necessary to punish, and what feelings punishment was meant to evoke.
Legal scholars in the past did not shun the complex relationship
between law and emotions. Yet it is in the last two decades that
specialists from different disciplines, from law theory to psychology,
from philosophy to history, have shown an increasing and lively interest
in unravelling the role played by passions, feelings and sentiments in
criminal law. Special attention has been focused on three key areas:
norms, practices and people.
This two-day conference seeks to historicize the relationship
between law and emotions, focusing on the period from the sixteenth
century to the present. It aims to ask how legal definitions,
categorizations and judgments were influenced by, and themselves
influenced, moral and social codes; religious and ideological norms;
scientific and medical expertise; and perceptions of the body, gender,
age, social status. By examining the period between the sixteenth
century and the present day, this conference also seeks to challenge and
problematize the demarcation between the early modern and the modern
period, looking at patterns and continuities, as well as points of
fissure and change, in the relationship between law and emotions. In
particular, it seeks to question the extent to which ideas about law and
emotions fundamentally shifted around the eighteenth century—the
traditional marker of the ‘modern’ period.
This conference will explore how legal professionals, as judges,
prosecutors, defense attorneys and other legal officials, handled
different forms of knowledge about emotions in the practice of law, in
accordance with, or in opposition to, general social and cultural
attitudes and public opinion. It will further investigate the presence
and absence—and their meanings—of emotions in the courtroom, as a
fundamental aspect of criminal law practices. It will take into
consideration not only the emotions which were shown, expected and
provoked but also the ones which were repressed, controlled or
proscribed by different legal actors and the public. Finally it will
also include analysis of how legal understandings of emotions were
portrayed in the media and in the wider society.
We invite submissions from scholars of different historical
disciplines, working on early modern and modern periods and particularly
encourage proposals from scholars working on Northern, Central and
Eastern European countries, and the non-Western world.
The conference will be held in English.
Accommodation and travel expenses for those presenting will be
covered by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. If you are
interested in participating in this conference, please send us a
proposal of no more than 300 words and a short CV by 1 October 2014 to
cfp-emotions@mpib-berlin.mpg.de. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes, in order to allow time for questions and discussion.
Dr. Laura Kounine, Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin
Dr. Gian Marco Vidor, Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin

03 July 2014

Pax Forlag (Oslo) published a collective work under the direction of Prof. J. O. Sunde (Bergen), assembling contributions on constitutionalism in Pre-Revolutionary Europe (link).

Contents:

"The Constitution of Peace and Liberty in the Catalan Medieval Legal Tradition. An Example of the Interaction between Religious Law and Secular Law in the European Middle Ages" (Prof. Aniceto Masferrer, Valencia)

"Galbert of Bruges on the Flemish 1127-1128 Crisis - An Early Experiment in Constitutionalism, Parliamentarism and Popular Sovereignty Inspired by Feudal Law" (Prof. Dirk Heirbaut, Gent)

"On the Development of the Term "Verfassung" from the Plurality of the Ancien Régime's "Leges Fundamentales"" (dr. Heinz Mohnhaupt, emeritus, MPI Frankfurt)

"Above the Law - Norwegian Constitutionalism and the Code of 1274" (Jorn Oyrehagen Sunde)

Abstract:

The great era of constitutionalism spans from the French revolution of July 1789 to the octroyed French constitution of June 1814. Yet, the European constitutional mechanisms and way of reasoning can be traced much further back. This project displays the need to expand, restrain and at the same time legitimise state power from the 12th century and beyond the great era of constitutionalism in order to demonstrate its historical reach.
The Church was an early example of a state-like and centralised power, and thus contributed greatly to the development of a state organised Europe. This project examines the Church as a driving force behind constitutional reasoning and as a developer of constitutional practice throughout the Middle Ages. Feudal law, with its contractual based system of rights and duties, could regulate society on several levels and thus was another source for constitutional reasoning and practices.
Constitutional reasoning and practices developed in varied places such as the city-states of Flanders, the kingdoms of Norway and England, and the Iberian Peninsula. They continuously influenced state formation and politics in countries such as the Scandinavian kingdoms, as well as being the object of scholarly studies in Scotland, Germany and France. As a result, philosophers of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary movements could draw on a multitude of practices and theories during the 18th century.